HATE SINGER:
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emple shooter Wade Michael Page played in a number of neo-Nazi bands.Myspace

MILWAUKEE – Wade Michael Page, the madman who massacred six people at a Sikh temple, was a Nazi-tattooed skinhead who sickeningly displayed his love of swastikas on Facebook. The 40-year-old Army reject called himself “Jack Boot” and played bass with such bigoted bands as End Apathy, Blue-Eyed Devils and Aggressive Force.

“This guy was in the thick of the white-supremacist music scene — he was connected to some very scary people,” Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham, Ala., told The Post.

Potok’s group, which monitors issues such as racial hatred, said the murderous thug had been on its radar for years as a Nazi-band groupie.

Page also posted frequent comments on Internet forums for skinheads, repeatedly exhorting members to act more decisively to support their cause.

“If you are wanting to meet people, get involved and become active,” he wrote last year. “Stop hiding behind the computer or making excuses.”

Between March 2010 and the middle of this year, Page posted 250 messages on one skinhead site and appeared eager to recruit others. In March 2011, he advertised for a “family friendly” barbecue in North Carolina, imploring others to attend.

In November, Page challenged a poster who indicated he would leave the United States if Herman Cain was elected president.

“Stand and fight, don’t run,” he implored.

In an April message, Page said: “Passive submission is indirect support to the oppressors. Stand up for yourself and live the 14 words,” a reference to a common white supremacists mantra.

Page also was known to the Anti-Defamation League, which said he boasted tattoos that included a Nazi death head and a “Hammerskin” symbol.

Federal officials, too, had Page on their radar, but there was not enough evidence for a full investigation, the LA Times said.

Still, while his past hatred of minorities was well-documented, Wisconsin authorities yesterday said they haven’t pinpointed why Page suddenly went berserk Sunday and fatally gunned down six Sikhs and critically wounded three other people before cops killed him.

“We haven’t seen anything yet that would tell us clearly whether he went after Sikhs in particular” or possibly confused them for Muslims in a targeted hate crime, said one law-enforcement source.

Police said Page acted alone when he unloaded several magazines from a legal 9mm handgun into worshippers just before 10:30 a.m. at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek.

Before Page set his hatred to music, he spent six years in the Army. He enlisted in April 1992, and after basic training at Fort Sill, Okla., became a repair specialist on Hawk surface-to-air missiles, authorities said.

In 1994, he was reassigned to the psychological-operations unit at Fort Bliss, Texas — which spreads propaganda through nonviolent techniques such as dropping leaflets or blasting rock music at the enemy to confuse him.

His military career included a promotion to sergeant — but he was busted back down to the rank of specialist in 1998 for getting drunk while on duty and going AWOL, sources said.

Even then, Page was involved in white supremacy, one of his service buddies, Christopher Robillard of Oregon, told CNN.

“He would talk about the racial holy war, like he wanted it to come,” Robillard said.

“But to me, he didn’t seem like the type of person to go out and hurt people.”

Page’s Army stint ended in 1998 with an administrative discharge, an exit given to soldiers whose performance is poor or who have medical issues.

He was barred from re-enlistment, according to Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards.

The senseless bloodshed came on the heels of Page’s breakup with his girlfriend, Misty Cook, her pals said.

After the pair split, Page went into seclusion, living in a bare-bones apartment with just a blow-up mattress, his TV and computer, pals told The Post. He didn’t even have a shower curtain.

“[Cook] told him to leave because of his drinking,” said her upstairs neighbor, Sharon Page, who is not related to the shooter.

“She said he just dropped off the face of the earth six weeks ago. He got rid of his e-mail account and stopped going to work three weeks ago.”

Cook, a single mom whose young son, Otto, is autistic, had been attending college at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Witnesses of the temple carnage said yesterday that Page didn’t utter a word when he first walked up to a priest who was standing outside and shot him.

He then went into the building and opened fire, they said.

Police said Page’s gun was purchased legally, but declined to say by whom. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that the weapon was bought at a local gun shop July 28 and picked up on July 30.

In an interview in 2010, Page said he was all about “sociological issues, religion and how the value of human life has been degraded by being submissive to tyranny and hypocrisy that we are subject to.’’

Page had told a a white-supremacist Web site that he had been part of the racist music scene since 2000, when he left his native Colorado and started the band End Apathy in 2005.

The band is affiliated with the Hammerskins, a hard-core racist group with a history of violence and hate crimes.

Page had been working overnights at a nearby metalworking plant, several neighbors said, but Cook told friends he’d stopped showing up weeks ago.

The FBI searched Cook’s apartment and found a gun that reportedly belonged to her.

“She came downstairs after the FBI ID’d the shooter,’’ one neighbor said. “She said, “Did you hear about Wade?’ She seemed calm about it, like she was in shock. I wanted to say sorry for your loss, but I’m not really sorry, because he’s a monster.”

“They never seemed to do much together at all. She did most of the chores and took care of the boy,” Brown said. “He didn’t say much more than ‘Hi’ — if you could get that out of him.”

Wade Page’s family yesterday issued a statement saying it was “devastated by the horrific events” and asked for privacy.

“While there can be no words of comfort that will make sense of what happened that day, please be aware that our thoughts and prayers go out to all the victims and their families,” the statement read.

His stepmother, Laurie Page, said it’s been years since she spoke to him but she was shocked he turned into a hate-filled killer. “He was a happy young man and he was a happy teenager,” she told The Post.

Suburban Milwaukee police said they had no contact with Page before Sunday’s shooting, and his record gave no indication he was capable of such violence, authorities said.

Additional reporting by Emily Bradley and Adelaide Blanchard in Wisconsin, Stephen Swofford in Denver and Leonard Greene and Jeane MacIntosh in New York